New Bike!

New bike, new bike, new biiiiiiiike!

I got my new bike today. It's a Giant Sedona LX. It's what Giant calls a "Lifestyle" bike. It's not actually a mountain bike, you see, it's a "comfort mountain" bike.

I'm not entirely sure what that means, aside from, perhaps, "don't take this bike down Mt Stromlo unless you want to die", or something similar. However, I asked my friendly bike shop people to recommend something that could handle a bit of off road and fire-trails type riding while being comfortable and sturdy enough to do some touring (say, riding my bike to Brisbane), and that's the one they recommended.

I had these grand illusions of collecting the bike from the shop and riding over to the Nursing Home to visit my grandmother this morning, but quite frankly it was all too new and weird, so I thought I'd skip taking it half-way across town through "real traffic" until I'd had a chance to get to know him better, as it were. This weekend I'm going down the river, baby.

I'm almost happy with it. I've been almost happy with it ever since I ordered it. "Why almost?" I hear you ask. Well, it's because it was affordable. In all of the magazines I've been reading the bikes on review are usually around the $3,000 to $5,000 mark. Heck, I've even seen a few that were around the $10,000 mark. Now, I don't know if I'll ever do the kind of cycling where I'll see the value of a $10,000 bike, so I'm quite happy to leave those Italian racing machines in Italy (although, part of me will probably always drool over The Prince), but when most of the reviewed bikes cost more than my return flight to Europe, it makes me wonder what kind of quality I'm getting for my $900 dollars.

Plus, there's that whole "comfort mountain" and "lifestyle" thing. In the back of my mind something keeps whispering "you should have forked out at least another thousand and bought a 'real' mountain bike". I know, deep down, that the kind of riding I'm likely to do is probably best served by a bike like the Sedona, but there's this niggling feeling that I should have payed more for a bike with less comfort and more grunt.

I'm sure it will be fine. It's a good looking bike and I'm sure I'll fall in love with it and never look back. I could feel it starting to settle in just riding it around in the back yard to get the seat height right and work out what this front suspension thing is all about. And, next to my old bike (which I'll continue to use to get to work), it looks pretty darn shmicky.

Will I use it to ride to Brisbane? Well, maybe. One day. If I can manage to somehow make sure my mother doesn't notice I've gone. She's already freaking out at the idea of my riding it to Ingham. Don't even ask her what she thinks of my whole "riding around Estonia" plan. I'm surprised she hasn't offered me money to hire a car...